‘My sharpness in the face of dangers…’, in the weeks which followed his victory at the Granicus, Alexander deserved the motto which historians later put into his mouth. Tactically, his problem was plain. He had to follow up his advantage before the Persians could regain their balance and defy him at any of the strong strategic centres down the coast. Distance never inhibited him, and the western coast of Asia had never been heavily occupied by the king’s garrisons and feudal colonists, but he was moving into a world of complicated interests, each of which would have to be consulted in order to hasten his progress.
In the administrative jargon of the Persian empire, the coast of Asia Minor was divided into the country and the cities; the agreed owner of the country was the king, who received its fixed taxes and distributed farms as he pleased to colonists, administrators or Persian and Greek nobles with a claim to royal favour. The interposing buttresses of hills and the more remote parts of the interior were left to wild native tribes who were as independent as they could make themselves; the coastline, however, was thickly settled with Greek cities, and their status had long been argued between mainland Greek powers, who wanted to dominate them, and the Persian king, who wanted to tax them. For the past fifty years, these cities had been agreed by a treaty of peace to belong to the king; by his father’s slogan, Alexander was now committed to the familiar ideal of freeing them.
In finance and religion, the Persians had been neither meddlesome nor extortionate masters; their scale of tribute was fixed, most cities were rich from their land, especially those with an active temple bank, and just as some of the numerous magi in Asia Minor had found a home in Ephesus, so the Persian king respected the rights of the nearby precincts of the Greek gods Apollo and Artemis, whom he identified with gods of his own. But politically, like the Romans or the British, the Persians had found it most convenient to strike a bargain with the cliques of the rich and powerful. Local tyrannies flourished in the smaller and less accessible Greek cities, knowing that their narrow power had the support of the Persian administration. In the larger cities, Persian hyparchs, generals, judges and garrison commanders lived on contented terms with the local grandees, establishing friendships which in several cases bridged the differences of east and west with commendable warmth. As the cities were surrounded by the country, richer citizens were men with a double allegiance, for as country landowners they owed taxes to the Persian king but as citizens, they retained their eligibility for office within the city walls. Inevitably, the two allegiances tended to merge into one and usually it was the freedom of fellow-citizens which suffered, for the rich and powerful would follow their Persian sympathies and set up a political tyranny. Where rule by the rich was in the nature of Persian control and was often promoted by Persian intervention, city feelings clashed bitterly, and men lived in one of the most revolutionary situations in the ancient world. Rich were divided against poor, class, therefore, against class, and democrat loathed oligarch with an intensity which even the odious divisions of Greece could not equal, free from the provocation of a foreign empire. ‘The cities’, wrote Lucian, an Asian Greek sophist, when the Romans were playing the part of the Persians, ‘are like beehives: each man has his sting and uses it to sting his neighbour.’ His metaphor fitted Alexander’s age even more aptly for then, stings were as virulent and cities, like true hives, were actively divided on class lines.
Into this tangle of civic strife and class hatred, Alexander was heading with need for a quick solution. His father’s campaign was committed only to punishing the Persians on behalf of the Greeks; there had also been talk of freeing the Asian Greek cities, but punishment and freedom might mean little more than the riddance of Persian masters. The allied Greek leader was also a Macedonian conqueror: it would not be hard to stop his two positions from conflicting.
Immediately after the Granicus, he made three revealing moves. He issued orders that his army should not plunder the native land; he meant to own it, therefore, like a Persian king, and so he appointed the Macedonian leader of his advance invasion as satrap of Hellespontine Phrygia, a continuation of an enemy title which complimented Persian government, though it may have surprised his Macedonians. As for the natives who came down from the hills to surrender, he sent them back as disinterestedly as any of his Persian predecessors. Throughout the province tribute was to be paid at the same rate as to Darius. Troy was declared free and granted a democracy, a hint of where Alexander’s liberation might lead him, though as yet, no general provision was made for the Greek cities; the men of Zeleia, the Persians’ headquarters, were ‘excused from blame as they had been forced to take the Persian side’. Their tyrant, presumably, was to be deposed, if he had not already fled.
Parmenion was despatched from the battlefield to take the satrapal castle of Dascylium; as its guards had deserted, that presented no problem. Meanwhile Alexander took the ancient route south-west across the plain to Sardis, seat of the satrap of the Lydians, whose empire had been seized by the Persians more than two hundred years ago after a defeat of their renowned king, Croesus. Quick to strike, Alexander was not the only man in a hurry. Some seven miles outside the city walls, he was met by Mithrines, commander of the Persian fortress, and the most powerful men of Sardis, who offered him their city, their fortress and its moneys. Alexander took Mithrines on to his staff as an honoured friend and allowed Sardis and the rest of Lydia ‘to use the ancient laws of the Lydians and to be free’. As nothing is known of Persian government inside Sardis, except that the Lydians had been garrisoned and disarmed, it is impossible to decide what privileges this grant was meant to restore, but the Persians were famous for their provincial judges, and documents from Babylon and Egypt show how widely the ‘king’s law’ was invoked against their subjects. In spirit, Alexander made a gesture to the Lydians’ sensitivities, though his Greek crusade owed them nothing as they were not Greeks. Climbing the heights of the acropolis which still towers split in half above the tombs of the old Lydian kings in the plain below, Alexander marvelled at the strength of the Persian fortress and admired its triple wall and marble portico. Momentarily, he considered building a temple to Olympian Zeus on its summit, but thunderclaps broke from the summer sky and rain streamed down over the former palace of the Lydian kings: ‘Alexander considered that this was a sign from god as to where his temple to Zeus should be built and he issued orders accordingly.’ At this omen from Zeus the Thunderer, thoughts of a temple on the site of former domination gave way to a generous recognition of the Lydian kings, suppressed by the Persians for the past two hundred years, and diplomatically Alexander had more reason to choose the latter than obedience to a shower of rain.
As a conqueror, he meant to govern. A Companion was left to command the Persian fortress; one of Parmenion’s brothers became satrap of Lydia and Ionia with a suitable force to support him. This splitting of the commands was partly in keeping with the Persians’ practice and it divided the burden of work in an area that was not yet secure; as the Romans later realized, one officer could watch the other’s behaviour and report it to the king. A Greek, moreover, was charged with collection of the ‘tribute, contributions and offerings’. As a free city Sardis presumably paid the ‘contribution’, rather than imperial tribute, and the provision of a garrison of Argive Greeks was not necessarily a breach of her freedom, as enemy retaliations were likely and the city might need defence. But though Sardis profited, the rest of Lydia had only changed one master for another.
There was no point in wasting time on further rearrangements. The fortress treasure was a very valuable addition to army funds. The next goal was Ephesus, some fifty miles south-west by Royal Road. This powerful city had welcomed Philip’s advance force two years earlier, and there was every hope that it would prove friendly again. First, however, Alexander despatched all his allied Greek forces northwards to ‘Memnon’s country’ behind him, and if this was the general Memnon’s estate, he may have been hoping to catch his enemy in person. These forces were to rejoin him afterwards, as their help was valuable.
On hearing the news of the Granicus, the hired garrison at Ephesus had fled. ‘On the fourth day’ Alexander reached the city, restored any exiles who had been banished on his account and set up a democracy in place of an oligarchy. This, his first contact with a Greek city since his victory, was an important moment, particularly as Ephesus illustrated civil strife in full. Two years earlier, it had been held by a pro-Persian junta; then, Philip’s advance force had expelled the junta and restored democracy; a year later, the junta were back, exiling the democrats of the year before; now Alexander had tipped the balance and restored democracy decisively. Revelling in their return, the people ran riot and began to stone the families who had ruled through Persian support, fine proof of the bitterness they felt for tyrants. Alexander was man of the world enough to realize that one class is always as vindictive as its rival, and he forbade further inquisition and revenge, knowing that innocent lives would be taken in the name of democratic retribution. ‘It was by what he did at Ephesus, more than anywhere else, that Alexander earned a good name at that time.’
The news soon spread and as a result, it brought Alexander power. Two nearby cities offered their surrender, perhaps on democratic terms. and Parmenion was sent by road with enough troops to hold them to their word. Alexander was beginning to feel more confident as his influence spread, so he despatched one of his most practised Macedonian diplomats to the cities of Aeolia behind him and as many of the cities of Ionia as were still under barbarian rule’. His orders were justly famous: he was to ‘break up the oligarchies everywhere and set up democracies instead: men were to be given their own laws and exempted from the tribute which they paid to the barbarians’. Alexander, too often remembered solely as a conqueror, was staging a careful coup.
At a stroke, he had resolved the contradictions in his own position. Democracies did ample justice to his slogan of freedom, and by reversing the Persian’s support for tyrants and gentlemen, he had released class hatred and the fervour of suppressed democrats to conquer the cities of Aeolia and Ionia; he had not committed himself to similar treatment of the Greek cities further south, but he had ensured the thanks and loyalty of his new Greek governments behind and around him. There were sound precedents for his method. At Ephesus, at least, Philip’s advance force had set up a democracy; in the more distant past, the Persian king Darius I had recognized the force of the Asian Greek cities’ hatred for their tyrants and given them democracies after their rebellion of protest. So far from improvising, Alexander was exploiting the oldest political current in Greek Asia, and indeed the lasting ambition of most ordinary Greeks wherever they lived; only five years before, at the other end of the Greek world, the Greek cities in Sicily had been won by the Corinthian adventurer Timoleon and his similar promise of freedom through democracy, a precedent which may not have been lost on the Macedonians, Philip’s valued Companion, Demaratus of Corinth, had fought for Sicily’s liberation and as he had accompanied Alexander to Asia, he could have told him what democratic loyalties meant in a Greek city abroad; Alexander himself is implied to have preferred the rule of aristocrats. The coup may have been obvious, but others had ignored it, not least the Spartan invaders sixty years before, who had cynically domineered or deserted the Asian Greek cities whom they had come to free.
‘There is no greater blessing for Greeks’, proclaimed the Greek city of Priene fifty years after Alexander, ‘than the blessing of freedom.’ Such an attitude cared nothing for Asian natives, many of whom were serfs for the Greeks and their cities, but it was one which Alexander had turned most neatly to his own advantage. His announcement marked the end of an era, and was treated accordingly. Among those whom he restored, the mood was one of that jubilance peculiar to politicians who return to power beyond their expectations; many Ionian cities began to date their official calendars by a new age altogether, and thereafter, freedom would become identified with democratic rule, as if the two centuries of Persian tyrannies had been an illogical interlude. The vocabulary of politics changed, and in return, it is probable that the new governments paid Alexander, now or later in his lifetime, honours otherwise reserved for gods. This first sounding of a theme that loomed large in later years cannot yet be dated precisely. At Ephesus, perhaps soon after his visit, when Alexander asked that the rebuilt temple of Artemis should be dedicated in his own name, the citizens refused him ‘because it did not befit one god to do honour to another’, proof, if true, that men were already paying him worship. Again for the temple at Ephesus, the court artist Apelles painted a portrait of Alexander holding the thunderbolt of Zeus; this too suggests that Alexander had been deified as a new Zeus, but the date of the painting is uncertain. Lysippus, the court sculptor, is said to have protested that a hero’s spear would have been more appropriate than Zeus’s thunderbolt; he was, however, Apelles’s rival and prided himself on his statue of Alexander holding just such a spear. He was not a humble Ephesian, outlawed for his belief in democracy and now miraculously returned to his home town by courtesy of a twenty-two-year-old king. Alexander was not the first Greek to be honoured as a god for political favour; even his father’s brief liberation of several Asian Greek cities had been repaid by high religious honours that almost amounted to worship; the exultation of the moment made it thoroughly natural, but it is proof of the cities’ profound gratitude that their worship of Alexander as a god was no temporary and forced reaction. It was to persist spontaneously for more than four centuries, complete with temples, priesthood and sacred games; the rich came to value its various offices, but few oligarchs of the time would have viewed its beginnings with anything better than disgust and resentment.
Besides guaranteeing democracy, Alexander had abolished the payment of tribute by his Greek cities, a most generous privilege which no other master had ever granted them. But like modern governments, he had enough political sense to rename the tax which he claimed to have abolished; instead of tribute, some, if not all, Greek cities were to pay a ‘contribution’, probably a temporary payment until he could finance his fleet, army and garrisons entirely from plunder. At Ephesus the tribute was to continue; it was to be paid to the city’s goddess Artemis, whom Iranians had long identified with their water-goddess Anahita, and the revenues would presumably be used for the cost of rebuilding her splendid temple; an Iranian official, was confirmed in charge of the temple funds and administration, a responsible job for which the oriental nature of the cult suited him, and in the goddess’s honour, Alexander held a procession of his army in full battle order. He then left the city for Miletus, an Ionian city on the coast whose governor had promised surrender in a letter. Once over the first hills, his road wound through level hayfields, down which he moved his lighter baggage in wagons, while the machinery and heavy gear were shipped along the coast by the transport vessels in his fleet. On the way Parmenion and his troops rejoined him, and they made their way through the river valley of the Meander, receiving the surrender of small cities where they could set up democracies and ask for contributions.
At Miletus, an Ionian city, their hopes were to be disappointed: the city was set on a jutting headland, and as soon as its garrison commander heard that help from the Persian navy was on its way, he had changed his mind about surrender. This was disturbing news as naval support could keep this powerful position open indefinitely; as so often before, Alexander’s solution lay in his speed. He captured the outer city, installed his allied Greek fleet in the harbours to block anchorage by the Persians, and settled down to wall off the rest of the city and besiege it into submission by slow but traditional means. Three days later, the Persians’ fleet appeared in force from Egypt 400 ships strong in the opinion of Alexander’s officers. For the first time in Asia Alexander was outnumbered. As he now held the strong defensive position, he need only have continued to block the city’s harbour from attack and go about his siege as usual; however, the sight of Persian ships, it is said, moved Parmenion once more to offer his advice; after their dialogue at the Granicus, suspicion stirs uneasily.
Parmenion advised Alexander to attack both because he expected that the Greek fleet would win and because he was convinced by an omen from heaven: an eagle had been sitting on the shore by the stern of Alexander’s ships. If they won, it would be a great help for the war as a whole: if they lost, it would not be a grave disaster as the Persians were already masters of the sea. He would go on board in person and take his share of the danger.
Alexander, however, considered that
Parmenion’s judgement was wrong and his interpretation of the omen was improbable. It made no sense to fight with a few ships against many more, especially as the Cypriots and Phoenicians on the enemy side were a practised unit, whereas his own fleet was not fully trained: in an insecure position, he did not wish to surrender the experience and daring of his Macedonians to the barbarians. Defeat at sea would be a serious blow to the initial glory of the war, the more so as the Greeks would revolt if encouraged by news of a naval disaster.
As for the omen, ‘the eagle was indeed in his favour, but because it had been seen sitting on dry land, in his opinion it meant that by land, he would overcome the Persian fleet’.
This refusal to fight at sea was tactically sound. It would have been foolhardy to risk a naval battle against so many ships, some of which were technically superior to Alexander’s Greek fleet. They were an expert force, even if their crews were drawn from Cyprus and Phoenicia, areas where Greek culture had made its mark and revolt against Persia had been recent. It is most unlikely that the experienced Parmenion ever proposed such an indiscretion except in the pages of court history, where first Callisthenes, then Alexander’s friend Ptolemy could work up his ‘proposal’ as a foil to their myth of Alexander. Events soon explain why they invented such a discussion; as for the eagle, bird of Zeus, it was a suitable omen for a king whom Zeus protected and it was also the symbol on the first gold coins which Alexander issued in Asia.
At first, Miletus tried to beg neutrality, but Alexander rightly refused it, and battered his way into the streets with the help of his siege engines. Many Milesian citizens ‘fell in front of Alexander and implored him as suppliants, delivering themselves and their city into his hands’; these no doubt, were ordinary men who yearned for a return to democracy. But a few Milesians fought bitterly beside the hired Greek garrison until they were forced to launch into the sea and swim or paddle their way to an offshore island for safety; these, no doubt, were the richer citizens who had domineered the city with Persian support. Even on their island, they prepared to resist heroically, until Alexander intervened and offered to spare them, ‘being seized with pity for the men because they seemed to him to be noble and true’. He enrolled all 300 of them in his army, no longer branding them as traitors; unlike the hordes he had punished at the Granicus, he had made them a promise in return for their surrender, and so lived up to it, not least because a mere 300 soldiers would not be a strain on his army treasury.
Mercenaries apart, a signal victory was being won out to sea. Like all warships in the ancient world, the Persians’ men-of-war were like ‘glorified racing-eights’ and had so little room on board in which to store provisions that they were forced to remain in daily touch with a land base. Meals could not be cooked on the move and fresh water had to be collected by putting into a nearby river-mouth. Sharp as ever, Alexander had anticipated them and sent several units by land to beat them off. Thwarted and thirsty, the Persian crews sailed away to the island of Samos where they stocked with stores, perhaps with the help of its resident Athenians. On their return to Miletus, they still fared no better for water, and so gave up the struggle in the interests of their stomachs, and sailed away southwards. Having won his victory from dry land, as prophesied, Alexander took the decision which was to determine his route for the next two years; except for twenty Athenian ships who could carry his siege equipment along the coast and serve as hostages for their fellow citizens’ obedience, he disbanded his entire fleet.
Even in antiquity, the merits of this bold order were vigorously disputed and at an early date, historians who had served with Alexander felt bound to defend their king’s sound sense. Hence, at the beginning of the siege, they inserted a naval dialogue with Parmenion as a preface to the fleet’s dismissal. Just as on the banks of the Granicus, Parmenion had been introduced into the story in order to stress Alexander’s daring and play down the cautious truth, so at Miletus he was used in reverse, stressing Alexander’s safe logic and smoothing over the very real risk which he was soon to take by disbanding his allied navy.
‘He considered’, wrote his officers, ‘that as he now held Asia with his infantry, he no longer needed a fleet.’ This does so little justice to Alexander’s foresight that it can only be pious publicity; so far from not needing a fleet, let alone a Greek fleet, seven months later Alexander was forced to order his allied ships to reassemble in the face of the Persian counterattack which he must always have feared. His allied Greek fleet employed at least 32,000 men at the gigantic cost of some 160 talents a month and despite the treasures of Sardis and the hopes of tribute and contributions, he was seriously worried about his finances; his Greek allies were presumably not obliged to pay for their crews’ upkeep, an imposition which was only tried later in a special case. The following spring, he could send 600 talents home to Antipater and a further 500 to finance the recruitment of his second allied navy, but this surplus may not have been ready at Miletus and anyway, tactics, as much as money, were at the root of the dismissal. Outnumbered, and unable to risk a head-on engagement against superior crews, ‘Alexander thought that by capturing the coastal cities he would break up the Persian fleet, leaving them nowhere to recruit crews or use as a seaport in Asia’. In view of an ancient warship’s dependence on its land base for daily supplies, Alexander had calculated this strategy shrewdly. On a lesser scale, it had worked already at Miletus and reapplied, it would eventually force the Cypriot and Phoenician ships to surrender and join his side. Friends later passed off the strategy as safe and free of risk, but it needed two years’ faith and patience to succeed. During this time the Persian fleet threatened the entire Aegean, regained the use of many harbours which Alexander thought he had closed, and might, with more luck, have forced him to return to the Asian coast. It was a strategy shot through with short-term danger. Nevertheless finance and numbers made it the one sound option. Alexander, at least, had the foresight and daring to pursue it to its hazardous end.
Land bound, therefore, like his eagle, he prepared to leave Miletus and follow the coast south. As an Ionian city, Miletus was given a democracy, ‘freedom’ and exemption from tribute, but all foreign prisoners, as was the custom, were enslaved and sold. Out of gratitude, the restored democrats agreed that Alexander should be the city’s honorary magistrate for the first year of their new epoch; he did not, however, delay, for the first hills of the satrapy of Caria rose beyond him and it was here that he could expect Memnon to rally Persians from the Granicus and their unscathed fleet. Since his victory, Persians had hardly been in evidence at all; it was probably during the past weeks that a fugitive son of Darius had tried to enlist Alexander’s help, only to be assassinated on Darius’s orders. Such treacheries in the royal family were very much to be hoped for, but in Caria a more solid rally seemed inevitable, while Memnon was alive to supervise it.
As in Ionia, Greek cities still lined Caria’s increasingly jagged coastline, but their citizens were secondary to the natives of the pine forests and patches of plain inland. In the past two decades, many of these natives had been introduced to the ways of hellenized city life by their local dynasts who had also ruled as Persian satraps. This voluntary patronage of Greek culture had become a political issue, for it had encouraged Caria’s ruling family to bid for independence when the Persian Empire seemed weak. Even in the remote interior, pillared temples had been built in honour of Greek gods, and in the four main cities, decrees were passed in keeping with Greek protocol. Greek names and Greek language had already gained control in the more accessible areas and Alexander was not yet confronted by serious barriers of language; the barriers, rather, were political. Many villages had been merged some twenty years ago into the rebuilt town of Halicarnassus, a hellenized capital of Greek origins, and hellenism always fostered independence from Asia; however, Caria did not share Greek culture enough to be won over by another promise of democracy and the slogan of Greek revenge. There was no class hatred to exploit in Caria and Alexander needed a line of attack which would appeal to native politics without involving him in long-drawn effort. On crossing the border, he found precisely what he wanted: he was met by a noble lady in distress.
Ada, former Queen of Caria, could look back on a life seldom independent, repeatedly sad. Born into a ruling family where women retained certain rights of succession, she had watched her remarkable brother Mausolus civilize and extend her home kingdom in the 350s until she had bowed to the pressures of family politics and married his only son, resigning herself to a husband some twenty years her junior who was unlikely to respond with passion to the advances of his elderly aunt. Though childless, the couple had remained true, until first Ada’s brother, then her nephew-husband had died and Ada had found herself a widow, heiress to a kingdom which was not an alluring inheritance for a woman in her middle age. Meanwhile her youngest brother Pixodarus was alive and scheming. He had banished Ada into retirement, taken the title of satrap and plunged into foreign politics with the proper energy of a man. It was Pixodarus who had exchanged envoys with King Philip three years before to discuss a marriage between his daughter and one of King Philip’s sons, the very plan which Alexander had frustrated by his over-anxiety. Instead, Pixodarus had married his daughter to an Iranian administrator; shortly afterwards, Pixodarus too had died and for the first time for fifty-seven years, the satrapy of Caria had been inherited by an Iranian, that son-in-law Orontobates who owed his marriage and position to a bungling act of Alexander’s youth. Ageing in the confinement of a single fortress, Queen Ada had reason to reflect on the sorrows of her past.
Now from the maze of her family history, hope had strangely reappeared. That same Alexander was approaching, no longer a nervous boy of nineteen. Ada left her citadel at Alinda and came to meet him at the border, keen to retain at least the little she still controlled. She knew the conventions of her family, knew also that she was royal and childless, that the years were slipping by. She came, therefore, with a tentative suggestion: she would surrender her fort in the hope of reinstatement, but she also requested that Alexander might become her adopted son.
Alexander was quick to recognize a windfall, however unusual, and received her with respect. Through Ada, he could appear to the Carians as protector of their weaker local interests against Persia; support for a member of their hellenizing dynasty would fit with his liberation of the resident Greeks. His adoption was popular. Within days, nearby cities of Caria had sent him golden crowns; he ‘entrusted Ada with her fortesss of Alinda and did not disdain the name of son’: his new mother hurried home delighted, and ‘kept sending him meats and delicacies every day, finally offering him such cooks and bakers as were thought to be masters of their craft’. Alexander demurred politely: ‘he said that he needed none of them; for his breakfast, his preparation was a night march; for his lunch, a sparing breakfast’; it was a tactful evasion of Asian hospitality, and his mother countered by renaming her Carian fortress as an Alexandria, in honour of her lately adopted son.
Culinary matters were not Ada’s only concern. She confirmed the ominous news that Memnon and Persian fugitives from the Granicus had rallied again at Halicarnassus, the coastal capital of Caria; Memnon had been promoted by order of royal letter to the ‘leadership of lower Asia and the fleet’ and as a pledge of his loyalty, he had sent his children inland to Darius’s court. With ships, imperial soldiers and a strong hired garrison, he had blockaded Halicarnassus, trusting in the circling line of walls and the satrapal citadel which had been built by Ada’s eldest brother; Alexander, therefore, should expect a serious siege. The necessary equipment was carried by ship to the nearest open harbour and the king and his army marched south to meet it by the inland road.
The siege of Halicarnassus is a prelude to one of the major themes of Alexander’s achievement as a general. Nowadays, he is remembered for his pitched battles and for the extreme length of his march, but on his contemporaries, perhaps, it was as a stormer of walled cities that he left his most vigorous impression. Both before him and after him, the art was never mastered with such success. Philip had been persistent in siegecraft without being victorious and it is the plainest statement of the different qualities of father and son that whereas Philip failed doggedly, Alexander’s record as a besieger was unique in the ancient world. Though a siege involves men and machines, a complex interaction which soon comes to the fore in Alexander’s methods, it is also the severest test of a general’s personality. Alexander was imaginative, supremely undaunted and hence more likely to be lucky. At Halicarnassus, he did not rely on technical weaponry of any novelty and his stone-throwers, the one new feature, were used to repel enemy sallies rather than to breach the walls, probably because they had not yet been fitted with torsion springs of sinew. He was challenged by the strongest fortified city then known in Asia Minor, rising ‘like a theatre’ in semicircular tiers from its sheltered harbour, with an arsenal to provide its weapons and a jutting castle to shelter its governor. As the Persians held the seaward side with their fleet, Alexander was forced to attack from the north-east or the west where the outer walls, though solid stone, descended to a tolerably level stretch of ground. The challenge was unpromising, especially as the enemy were masters of the sea, and it is not easy to decide why he succeeded, even after doing justice to his personal flair.
Two descriptions of the siege survive and they match each other most interestingly; the one, written by Alexander’s officers, again minimizes his difficulties, confirmation of the way in which the myth of his invincibility was later developed by contemporaries; the other, probably based on soldiers’ reminiscences and Callisthenes’s published flatteries, rightly stresses the city’s resistance and notes that the defenders were led by two Athenian generals with the stirringly democratic names of Thrasybulus and Ephialtes, whose surrender Alexander had demanded in the previous autumn; though spared, they had crossed to Asia to resist the man who was supposed to be avenging their city’s past injustices. A third leader, it was agreed, was a Macedonian deserter, probably the son of one of the Lyncestians who had been killed at the accession; they made a strong team, but neither of the histories makes it plain that their main defence was to last for two months, including the heat of August.
At first, Alexander skirmished lightly, probably because his siege engines had not yet laboured their slow way by road from the harbour some six miles to the rear, the one port unoccupied by the Persians’ fleet. He encamped on level ground half a mile from the north-east sector of the wall and busied his men first with an unsuccessful night attempt to capture a sea-port some twelve miles west of the city which had falsely offered surrender, then with the filling of the ditch, 45 feet wide and 22 feet deep, which had made the north-east wall of Halicarnassus inaccessible to his wheeled siege towers. Diggers and fillers were sheltered by makeshift sheds until their ditch was levelled out and the siege-towers, newly arrived by road, could roll across it into position; thereupon catapults cleared the defenders, rams were lowered from the siege towers on to the walls, and soon two buttresses and an appreciable length of fortifications had been flattened. Undaunted, the defence sallied forth by night, led by the renegade Lyncestian; torches were hurled into the wooden siege engines and the Macedonian guards were unpleasantly surprised in the darkness before they had time to put on their body-armour. Having made their point, the defenders retired to repair the hole in their outer wall and build a semicircular blockade of brick on hilly ground. They also finished a sky-high tower of their own which bristled with arrow-catapults.
The next incident is unanimously ascribed to the heartening effect of drink. One night, two or more soldiers in Perdiccas’s battalion, flown with insolence and wine, urged on their fellows to a show of strength against the new semicircular wall. The ground was unfavourable, the defenders alert and amid a flurry of catapults, Memnon led such a counterattack that Alexander himself was forced to the rescue of his disorderly regiment. But though the defenders retired, they did so as they pleased: Alexander had to admit defeat and ask for the return of the Macedonian dead, the accepted sign that a battle had been lost. In his history, King Ptolemy recorded the start of this drunken sortie, knowing that it discredited Perdiccas, the rival with whom he had fought after Alexander’s death, but he suppressed the defeat which followed, unwilling to reveal a failure by his friend Alexander; it thus went unsaid that within the city, the Athenian exile Ephialtes had urged his fellow defenders not to return the enemy bodies, so fervent was his hatred of the Macedonians.
Anxious at this setback, Alexander battered and catapulted as furiously as ever. Again the Persians sallied, and again, covered by their fellows from higher ground, they came off well. That was only a prelude. A few days later, they planned their most cunning sortie, dividing themselves into three separate waves at Ephialtes’s bidding. The first wave was to hurl torches into Alexander’s siege-towers in the north-east sector; the second was to race out from a more westerly gate and take the Macedonian guards in the flank, while the third was to wait in reserve with Memnon and overwhelm the battle when a suitable number of opponents had been lured forward. According to the officers, these sorties were repelled ‘without difficulty’ at the west and north-east gates; in fact, the first two waves did their job splendidly and Alexander himself was compelled to bear the brunt of their onslaught. The entry of the third wave into the battle startled even Alexander, and only a famous shield-to-shield rally by a battalion of Philip’s most experienced veterans prevented the younger Macedonians from flinching and heading for camp. However, Ephialtes was killed, fighting gloriously at the head of his hired Greeks, and because the defenders shut their gates prematurely, many of his men were trapped outside at the mercy of the Macedonians. ‘The city came near to capture,’ wrote the officers, ‘had not Alexander recalled his army, still wishing to save Halicarnassus if its citizens would show a gesture of friendliness.’ Night had fallen and presumably Alexander’s men were in some disorder; if he had thought he could attack successfully, citizens or no citizens, as at Miletus, he would have done so.
That night the Persian leaders decided to abandon the outer city: the wall was broken, Ephialtes was dead, their losses were heavy and now that their garrison had dwindled, perhaps they feared betrayal by a party within the city. ‘In the second watch of the night’, about ten o’clock, they set fire to their siege-tower, their arsenals and all houses near to the walls, leaving the wind to do its worst. The satrap Orontobates decided to hold the two promontories at the entrance to the harbour, trusting in their walls and his mastery of the sea.
When the news reached Alexander’s camp, he hurred into the city, giving orders, said his officers, that any incendiaries should be killed, but that Halicarnassian citizens in their homes should be spared. When dawn showed him the extent of the damage, he ‘razed the city to the ground’, a detail recorded in both versions but evidently exaggerated as the city’s famous monuments remained unscathed. Probably, Alexander only cleared a space from which to besiege Orontobates’s two remaining strongholds, for some 3,000 troops were ordered to continue the siege and garrison the city. As Halicarnassus had been stubborn, there was no reason to give her a democracy or call her free. She was a Greek city, but she was not Ionian or Aeolian and had been promised nothing; her promontories were to hold out for another whole year and serve the Persian fleet as a base of supply. But Caria, at least, had fallen; mother Ada was named its satrap and given troops under a Macedonian commander to do any work that might prove too strenuous for an elderly woman. Thus, under a female eye, Alexander’s principle of a province split between a native satrap and a Macedonian general was introduced for the first time.
The siege of Halicarnassus leaves a mixed impression. Alexander had persevered, and personally he had fought with his usual courage, but his victory, and that only within its limits, was not due to bold ingenuity or mechanical subtlety so much as to outnumbering an enemy who had sallied repeatedly. None the less, an important point of supply for an Aegean fleet had been breached, if not wholly broken, and as autumn was far advanced, most generals could have been forgiven for relaxing. Typically, Alexander did nothing of the sort.
Before advancing, he gave orders that all Macedonians who had married ‘shortly before his Asian campaign’ should be sent back home to Macedonia to spend the coming winter with their wives. ‘Of all his actions, this earned Alexander popularity amongst his Macedonians’, besides helping their homeland’s birthrate and encouraging more reinforcements. Led by the husband of one of Parmenion’s daughters, the bridegrooms bustled homewards, and Alexander thinned out his forces, detailing Parmenion to take the supply wagons, the Greek allies and two squadrons of cavalry back by road to Sardis and thence to await him further east on the Royal Road. The siege equipment was despatched to Tralles, and ever inexhaustible, Alexander announced that he would head south to the coast of Lycia and Pamphylia ‘to hold the seaboard and render the enemy useless’.
Putting his dry-land tactics into action, he thus turned his back for ever on the Asian Greek cities whom he had come to free. Their freedom, of course, depended on him and only extended as far as he wanted; that, often, might be far enough, while he also showed them the favour of plans for new buildings, here a causeway, there a new street-plan, and at the Ionian city of Priene, centre of the Pan-Ionian festival, he dedicated the city’s new temple to Athena, probably contributing to its funds. Just as he had honoured Zeus at Sardis or Artemis at Ephesus he favoured the local gods of the Greek cities down to the smallest details of cult and decoration. Like his plans to rebuild Troy, several of his building schemes were delayed or only carried out by local decision, but nonetheless in Greek Asia, if anywhere, the Greek crusade became a holy war of revenge and restoration. Its fervour must not be played down.
Other schemes had a longer and more calculated future. An ingenious policy seems to have begun with Alexander, whereby royal favourities who were rewarded with country estates were now forced to attach them to the ‘free’ territory of a Greek city and become its honorary citizens. The result was a system of local patronage. Under the Persians, such land grants had been made without restrictions and created a provincial baronry free from the king, or a class of absentee landlords, free from their locality. Alexander and his Successors arranged that their favourites should be local citizens, able to report and maintain their king’s interests in city affairs, while the Greek cities gained a rich local benefactor and an added acreage of land. By tying country estates to city life, a balance of interest was struck, and it lasted. Typically, it was city life which Alexander put first in his empire.
Country life, as always, saw less change. The colonial villages of the Persian kings’ provincial soldiery remained on their old sites. The same baronial towers, perhaps now in Macedonian hands, surveyed the landscape from Pisidia to the Cyzicene plain and their name still survives in the common Turkish place-name Burgaz; their land was still farmed by serfs whom nobody freed, although many of them lived in some comfort in their own houses. But through this continuity, a new current had begun to flow. In the Caicus valley, for example, the colonists from distant Hyrcania, who had fought with their satrap at the Granicus, lived on in the land called the Hyrcanian Plain, where Cyrus had settled them two centuries earlier but over the years their villages would be merged into a town and mixed with Macedonians. Their traditional fire-worship continued, but when they appear in Roman history, it is as citizens dressed and armed in the style of Macedonian westerners.
After Alexander the force of Greek culture came to be guaranteed in western Asia; the cities’ recognition of a new age was more than a detail of their calendars, for many felt that Alexander was what he said: a saviour of the Greeks from Persian slavery and an avenger of Persian sacrilege in the name of Greek freedom. It was thus among Iranians of the former empire that this mood of Alexander’s passing made itself most felt. Repeatedly in the next hundred years, Iranians who lived on in Asia Minor are known to have joined the councils and magistracies of the Greek cities whose future Alexander had underwritten, a life of civic duty which contrasted with the baronial isolation of their past. Only their religion remained as a solid landmark in a changed world. The worship of the water goddess Anahita was continued by the magi who met to read their sacred texts among assemblies of the Iranian faithful in the hinterland of Greek Asia. An Iranian could no longer be sure of his country tower, but he could still find a place in his goddess’s worship; an Iranian eunuch was left to run the temple affairs of Artemis at Ephesus, and in a small Carian town in Alexander’s lifetime two Iranians became honorary citizens in order to serve as priests of Anahita, whom the Greeks saw as Artemis, a job for which their background suited them and which they passed from father to son for another three generations. These priesthoods were to prove their one safe haven in a world of civic duty, the rest of which bore little likeness to their past. But as Alexander turned south to Lycia, leaving his Greek cities to an unchallenged Persian fleet, it was still far from certain that an Iranian’s days of satrapal politics had been more than momentarily interrupted.